Lois Tilton February 13th, 2007
I don’t usually review films - in large part, because I rarely go out to see them. However, having recently viewed this one, I recognize it as the sort of fantasy tale that I do usually review. Here is my take - in which I discuss the ending of the film.
My reviews of short genre fiction can be read at www.irosf.com
Lois Tilton February 3rd, 2007
The people who do literary theory and criticism like to use the word “text” a lot, but I suspect I am going to be using it here in a way they might not approve. The text as I conceive it is the arrangement of words that tell a story, but it is not itself the story. The story itself exists prior to the text, in the mind of the author, and beyond it, in the minds of the readers. The act of writing a story is the attempt to recreate the story in the author’s mind in the medium of written words – a text. The act of reading the text is the recreation of the story in the reader’s mind.
Of course words are not the only medium in which a story can be told, and some people call those other forms of telling “texts” as well. It is possible to tell the same story in different ways – not only in different words, but in different media, yet it remains, in some fundamental way, the same story. “Cinderella,” for example, has been retold thousands of times, with and without using words: spoken, written, sung, danced, mimed, drawn. Yet through all these alterations, it remains at its heart the same story. The thing that we recognize behind the difference in media is the story itself.
In an art studio, we can often find a dozen different artists drawing the same model. The resulting portraits are usually quite different from one another. The artist is not, as a rule, attempting a perfectly exact replication of the model’s form and features. It is rather that in the mind of each artist there is an image of the model that he is attempting to capture and reproduce in lines or brush-strokes on paper; this mental image is the analogue of the story, and the lines of the pencil are the artist’s words.
By the story, then, I mean the “thing told”; by the text, I mean the particular telling of it. And that the story itself, in our minds, exists in our minds apart from and independent of any of its tellings.
Kate Elliott February 2nd, 2007
I think we can accept as a given that there are poorly thought through and poorly written science fiction and fantasy novels out there, even published ones. We might not entirely agree on which are which, but that’s a different question.
Invariably, married as I am to an anthropologist, I find comments like this (by Rob Sawyer) amusing for the way in which they ignore (and might well suggest ignorance of) not just the deep structures embedded in (thoughtful) fantasy but also the ways in which fantasy can examine history, historical structures, sociology, and anthropology, as well as the shifts in technology seen as cultures change.
And, really, SF has always had a lot more in common with mystery than with fantasy. Both SF and mystery prize rational thinking and deduction, and require the reader to pick up clues about what’s really going on as they read the story. Fantasy and SF, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed: one is reasoned, careful extrapolation of things that really could happen; the other, by definition, deals with things that never could happen.
Kate Elliott January 23rd, 2007
Warning:Â Spoilers for ROME, the recent HBO miniseries
One of the ways I rate my enjoyment of books and filmic-visual fiction is in how the roles of women are approached by the writers and/or directors. Certain conventions are sure to minimize my enjoyment of a narrative, and chief among them is the narrowing of women’s roles to those related to reproduction and/or Relationship to the Male. In such cases, women are portrayed either as wombs (mother, surrogate mother, or wife) or vaginas (of sexual interest to male characters without having any other real narrative function); that is, a female character has no existence beyond her relationship to men via sex and/or reproduction.
Continue Reading »
Lois Tilton January 21st, 2007
What I do now that I am no longer writing fiction is to review it. For the last year, I’ve been the short fiction reviewer for the Internet Review of SF.
I originally had Great Plans to do a 2006 Year’s Best Short Fiction column for IROSF, but these met the usual fate of Great Plans. I did, less ambitiously, compile a list of my most highly recommended stories, and I thought it might be of interest.
This is not a totally comprehensive list. I don’t claim to have read anywhere like every piece of short fiction published during the past year; these are my picks out of those I have reviewed, which includes stories from most of the pro and semi-pro zines, both print and online, but no anthologies. I have also, perhaps unfairly, excluded those pieces that I consider episodes or outtakes from some longer work.
Kevin Andrew Murphy January 17th, 2007
Terry Pratchett has this bit in Hogfather about how all stories begin and end with blood, at least until they get all sugarfrosted with stuff that certain parents want to say “children want.” Well, as much as I liked Hogfather, both the book and the recent SkyOne miniseries, I have to say that not only does Pan’s Labyrinth both begin and end with blood, but there’s a marvelous amount of blood throughout it. And oh, was it refreshing.
It was also simply wonderful to watch a movie where the magic was used in service of the story, not trying to sell any variety of cute tie-in toy or get on the cover of Fangoria.
What is it? It’s a movie by Guillermo del Toro (who I nearly fainted on top of a few years ago at Comicon when the air conditioners gave out), in Spanish with subtitles, currently out in certain cities but going out everywhere Friday. Last Comicon, I had to crawl through a giant tree and stick my hand in slime to get a golden key as a movie promo, and this is the main character, Ofelia’s, first task as the fairytale unfolds. Except her key is cooler, she dodges bugs and toads rather than fanboys, and this all happens against the backdrop of Franco’s Spain rather than Comicon.
I don’t want to spoil anything except to say Go. Go now. Go if you’ve ever loved fairytales, especially the dark ones where wicked stepfathers are actively evil, monsters actually eat children, and virtue is its own reward.
Katharine Kerr October 8th, 2006
An interesting review appeared in the (London) Times Literary Supplement of a mighty tome indeed: WRITERS, READERS, AND REPUTATIONS, Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, by Philip Waller, Oxford University Press, 1,181 pages (!). Waller is a man of prodigious reading — he’s been plowing his way through the popular literature of this period, bestselling writers who are long forgotten: Nat Gould, whose books sold over 6 million copies; Charles Garvice, Hall Crane, Florence Barclay, Pearl Craigie — the list goes on and on. During Waller’s chosen period there was an explosion of popular books and reading, which he links to the spread of literacy, especially the passage in 1870 of the “Elementary Education Act” in the UK, which insured that all children would be taught to read and figure at the very least. In the USA, of course, educating all free-born children had been a goal even earlier. After the Civil War, ex-slaves were more than eager to learn to read — like the working class poor in the UK, they saw literacy as a way out of poverty.
Waller points out that reading as entertainment went hand in hand with reading as self-improvement. For every book on the many Victorian lists of “best books”, there were a hundred titles that were considered trashy, cheap, vulgar, you name it — just like our books, in other words. :-) But these were the books that the newly literate read in great quantities.
I wonder if we can say that this is the period that gave birth to true genre, that is, popular fiction that falls into certain well-defined patterns of narrative and theme. Fantasy writers like to point out that many medieval and earlier words contain fantastic elements, but as we’ve discussed elsewhere, in works like BEOWULF or The ILIAD such elements are not “fantasy” but part of a world-view that we no longer share.  Certainly there were popular entertainments in earlier eras — Hellinistic Greek adventure/romances come to mind. But these flourished in societies where literacy was the privilege of the few, not the many, and where books, copied by hand, were expensive.
Nat Gould’s novels of racetrack life sold for sixpence. You could get a Dickens for 2 shillings. Money was worth more, then, but these prices are comparable to $6 paperbacks or 11 pound trade paperbacks. Then as now books could be passed around and read by more than one person, too.
Before radio and the movies, if you wanted a story, you had to read it This is sometimes hard to imagine now. Everyone talks about TV and Movies and the Internet killing off literature, but I’m beginning to think that literature will survive just fine, that there will always be a large group of people who love to read it and will pay for the books they want.  Not even the best TV drama can really compete with a really great work of fiction. The rewards and joys are different twixt the two media.
It’s the flood of popular writing, the genres, that might well dry up because it answers needs that TV, Movies, and the like can also fill. Consider how modern special effects in film create the “sense of wonder” that written SF used to strive for. In some cases, at least, the non-book entertainments are more entertaining than the written.
Kevin Andrew Murphy September 5th, 2006
I had never before conceived of the Norns as pinheads with topknots. However, as you can see from the attached picture, the maskmaker and costume director for The Shotgun Players in Berkeley did:
This is for their production of Ragnarok, Doom of the Gods which will definitely be playing next weekend (September 9th & 10th) in Berkeley and possibly the weekend thereafter (according to some portions of the website but not others).
The theater space is the old 1908 Â outdoor ampitheatre at John Hinkel Park, and yesterday at 4, the weather for the special Labor Day show was pleasant turning to cool over the two hours of the production.
I went with my friend Yvonne, who knew the playwrights, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, and introduced me to them. Elizabeth was also playing Frigga, Odin’s wife.
The actors ranged from passable to excellent, with the standouts being Ben Dziuba as Loki and Erin Carter as everyone from Helga, the actor’s wife, to Thokk, the woman without tears. Her delivery of Thokk’s soliloquy gave me a frisson, and that’s what good playwrighting and acting are all about.
But the masks. Yvonne said the first time she’d seen the production, they made her think of pig snouts. Myself, I was just wondering why, when Snorri was getting into his father’s medieval Swedish costume trunk, he was somehow pulling things that owed a lot more to Comedia del Arte than to anything Scandinavian. The time shifts to include current day referrences in the script were mild in comparison to the disjoint of the masks. Costuming the jotuns as clowns made a certain amount of sense given their trickster nature, but having the Norns be pinheads with topknots was just bizarre, and not in a good way.
There was a small turnout yesterday, but most of them were part of the Berkeley pagan contingent, so most everyone already knew the stories. Of the gods, Braggi was underused, acting more as spear carrier than poet in most scenes, and Iduna didn’t seem to have a line that wasn’t talking about her apples. But all in all, it was an enjoyable performance, and good to see something in the fantasy vein on stage as a new play.
Constance Ash September 2nd, 2006
Bad.
Very bad, They Say.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/movies/02wick.html?ref=arts
The first one wasn’t very good either, but lordessa, the location on the Summersisle was/is indescribably beautiful. (The new one is supposedly on an island in Puget Sound, and it’s all women, who are beekeepers.) The originals staging of the ancient sword dances and hobby horses and so on were thoroughly effective. The premise was almost plausible — except for the nude Britt Eklund writhing around the walls to the beat of a tambor to illustrate — what? the unrestrained female lust of a pagan woman? If so, the rigidly Catholic sacrifice never even got a taste ….
The 1973 film’s echos of John Fowles’s The Magus are of a certain literary historical interest, dimly caught from this many decades’ later perspective. So many college types at least, considered The Magus a ‘guide to life, along with The Lord of the Rings, Siddartha, Stranger in a Strange Land and Camus’s The Stranger. Doubtless the re-make never heard of The Magus….
Love, C.
Kate Elliott August 15th, 2006
1. Saving the World
Because the stakes don’t get any bigger than this!